2003-07-12 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- CIA Director George Tenet said Friday that his agency was to blame for allowing President Bush to present in his State of the Union speech baseless allegations that Iraq attempted to obtain uranium in Africa.

Tenet made the statement hours after Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had placed full responsibility on the Central Intelligence Agency for the inclusion of the charges in the president's speech on Jan. 28.

Bush, on the road in Uganda, defended his use of the false allegation by saying the speech "was cleared by the intelligence services."

Tenet said agency officials approved of including the accusation in the speech with the caveat that it had been reported by the British government, even though the U.S. officials doubted the veracity of the report the British had cited.

"This should not have been the test for clearing a presidential address," Tenet said in his statement. "CIA should have ensured that it was removed."

The director said the underlying assertion, that Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear program, was sound.

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The statement, which gave a rare, detailed glimpse into the intelligence process, was released at the end of a day of finger-pointing by White House officials and intensifying criticism from congressional Democrats about how the administration used intelligence to build the case for going to war. Tenet's statement appeared designed to quell the controversy.

"First, CIA approved the president's State of the Union address before it was delivered," he said. "Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. And, third, the president had every reason to believe that the text presented him was sound."

CIA AND ADMINISTRATION

Tenet's statement laid out in detail the agency's tracking of the uranium purchase report and shed light on the back-and-forth between intelligence officers who came to mistrust the story and administration officials who wanted to include it in the speech.

Reports first surfaced in 2001 that Iraq was attempting to acquire raw uranium from Africa, Tenet wrote, and the CIA attempted to confirm them in early 2002. The agency dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate reports of a deal in that country, and Wilson reported back that the reports did not appear to be true.

Tenet said the CIA warned the British against using the same accusation in a September 2002 white paper about Iraq "because we viewed the reporting on such acquisition attempts to be inconclusive." The British, he said, discounted the U.S. doubts.

In October, the intelligence community produced a 90-page classified National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, which outlined evidence that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his nation's nuclear program. Tenet said the case made in that document did not depend on the story about the attempted uranium purchase in Niger but that a three-paragraph section did discuss Iraq's existing uranium stockpile and cited reports that Iraq had tried to augment it by acquiring more from Africa.

'FRAGMENTARY' INTELLIGENCE

White House officials included that reference in early drafts of the State of the Union speech, and CIA officials "raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues," Tenet said. "Some of the language was changed. From what we now know, agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct -- i.e., that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa."

Tenet's account raised questions about the extent to which White House officials understood the doubts that existed about the report.

Administration officials "thought it was a zinger, and they wanted to keep it in, and so they basically haggled over the words," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. "It goes to the fundamental disconnect between intelligence officers and politicians, that intelligence is always caveated in a way that a policy speech cannot be."

"Everyone is trying to evade responsibility," said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. "There is to me very disturbing evidence of deception somewhere."

Bush and Rice said the president did not knowingly use false information in his speech. "If the CIA, the director of central intelligence, had said, 'Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone, without question," Rice told reporters.

She said Iraq's reported attempt to acquire lightly processed uranium, also known as yellowcake, was a minor issue in the case against Iraq. Nevertheless, the allegation was one of a handful of examples Bush used in his State of the Union speech to rally support against Iraq, along with recounting U.N. conclusions about previous Iraqi stores of chemical and biological weapons, U. S. assessments of Iraqi ability to deploy such weapons, U.S. intelligence reports of mobile biological laboratories, and Iraq's early 1990s nuclear program.

"You marshal and you save your best arguments for the State of the Union address," said Jeff Shesol, a Clinton administration speechwriter. "If there were three or four arguments being made in this regard, presumably they would be the best three or four arguments that you had."

Eight days after Bush's speech, Secretary of State Colin Powell made a presentation of the case against Iraq in front of the Security Council and omitted the assertion about African uranium.

"I didn't use the uranium at that point, because I didn't think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to present before the world," Powell told reporters in South Africa Thursday.

Not everyone was immediately satisfied with Tenet's explanation. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is reviewing prewar intelligence, said that "even if the CIA approved the Niger statement as factually accurate, since it pointed to British rather than U.S. intelligence, the speech was still blatantly misleading, and a lot of senior officials in the administration and the intelligence community knew it."

Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized the CIA for "sloppy handling" of the faulty information, specifically blaming Tenet before the director's statement was made public.

Administration officials said Friday that Tenet's job was not in danger.

False reports were repeated far and wide, but there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein's Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Africa

Aug. 26, 2002

Saddam Hussein has "resumed his effort to acquire nuclear weapons" and continues to "pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago."

Vice President Cheney, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars

Sept. 24, 2002

Iraq has "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, despite having no active civil nuclear power program that could require it."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, citing a U.K. intelligence dossier

Oct. 7, 2002

"If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."